


Your New Home

by laurelofthestory



Series: The Forgotten Words [6]
Category: The Blackout Club (Video Game)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Abrupt Ending, Altered Mental States, Family Issues, Gen, Origin Story, POV Second Person, Teenagers, accidental misgendering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:06:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27128980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurelofthestory/pseuds/laurelofthestory
Summary: Your name is Lauren Cunningham, and you don't think you like Redacre very much.Unfinished oneshot posted for theGood Intentions WIP-fest.
Series: The Forgotten Words [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1979123
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	Your New Home

**Author's Note:**

> Another unfinished work! This time including inline author's notes.
> 
> This one's from February 19th of this year and was meant to be an origin story for my player character/persona and some other original characters related to her. I think it just got too big for me to finish. Still love the game and the unique way it tells its story, though. I'd love to talk to THE-MEASURE-CUTS at least once before Enhanced Horror ends, but I can't guarantee I'd be able to say anything useful in an encounter since I haven't been active in the community for a few months.
> 
> ("accidental misgendering" tag is there because the POV is close and the POV character misinterprets a nonbinary character's gender presentation, as they still appear masculine and are closeted outside of the club. she quickly corrects herself when told.)
> 
> Check out other people's work for the Good Intentions event [here!](https://goodintentionswipfest.tumblr.com/)

Your name is Lauren Cunningham. You are fifteen years old, and you just moved to the town of Redacre, Virginia with your mom and your cat.

You don’t think you like it here very much.

For one thing, Redacre is in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone. Your mom is sympathetic, and she’s more lenient about electronics than the rest of the people in town, but you miss your internet and you miss your friends and you can’t help but feel like this is one of those places where you could disappear and no one would find you, like in old horror mystery novels you still read even though now they just make you paranoid.

For another, you’re going to school. An actual, real school that isn’t your house and your mom and your computer, with homework and tests and a bunch of other kids you don’t know and aren’t sure you want to. And you’ve never been to a real school before, but you’re pretty sure they’re not supposed to work like this one--you feel like you’re in a schoolhouse from before the turn of the century, and all the CHORUS teachers smile too much, and they don’t always teach history the way you remember it from back home.

Your house is all right, you guess. New construction, you and your mom are the first people to live in it, but it’s designed weird, it feels like you’re in the set of a 90s sitcom, and there are two separate doors leading into one hall bathroom for no reason you can fathom. CHORUS tells you that since it’s just you and your mom, they might end up having another family share the house with you eventually. You don’t like that idea.

There’s a strict curfew in place for the kids, something about a coyote problem. As far as you know, coyotes were a lot more of a problem in Kansas than Virginia, and they’re not a big deal anyway as long as the cat stays inside. But it’s one thing about the town that you really don’t mind, because you stay in your room anyway, sitting at your laptop late into the night.

And you write. You write stories of mystery, of the unknown. You write about yourself. You write about what’s going on around you. You think you want to be an author, or maybe a journalist when you grow up. You just know whatever it is you end up doing, you want to keep writing.

Despite how quiet it is, Redacre sure gives you a lot of material.

* * *

Your sleep schedule is fifteen kinds of fucked, so you’re up late on a Saturday night, sitting on your bed with your laptop in your lap and your cat sitting next to your feet. The cat is a tabby, a few years old, ostensibly your mother’s even if you take care of him most of the time, and ostensibly named Gregory, though you and your mom have called him ‘buster’ so much (as in, _“what’s that you’ve got there, buster?”_ or _“you’d better get off the fridge right this second, buster!”)_ that he responds to it like a name. 

It’s been about a month since you showed up in this town, and it’s got some weird vibes you don’t totally like, but you tell yourself it’s an adventure, and try to learn everything you can. Right now, you’re writing an article about the town’s history, or what you can find of it; there isn’t a whole lot, but your plan is to show the finished product to the principal and maybe get them to consider a school newspaper. You’re engrossed in what you’re doing, hoping to get a first draft hammered out before your motivation runs out, but your hearing is sharp enough to catch a door opening and closing down the hall, and you wince. Mom won’t be happy if she catches you up this late _again,_ so you stop typing and close the screen, hoping she hadn’t noticed the light under your door and will just go to the kitchen and then back to bed.

The floor squeaks as she passes your room and heads down the stairs towards the living room. And then something weird happens; you hear another door opening and closing, and you don’t hear footsteps anymore.

You don’t know this house as well as your old one, so you don’t know all the doors by heart yet (and there’s so _many_ of them, no thanks to the stupid bathroom), but you know the front door of your house opens into the living room. Now, your mom’s never been the kind of person to leave the house at night, even when you lived in a place where there was actually something to _do_ after dark. And she never just _leaves you alone--_ you’re independent, but she worries, and she always lets you know before she goes anywhere. She’d always made sure that she was never out of the house all night, too, even when her old work schedule wanted to say otherwise.

There’s a few long moments of silence while you debate with yourself, but, as usual, your curiosity wins out. If you run into her, you can pretend you took a nap too late and just happened to wake up in the middle of the night.

You set your laptop aside and pull your legs out from under the covers. Buster glances up from where he was napping and makes a noise in his throat, looking utterly affronted at the removal of your feet, though he’s not irritated enough to actually get up and follow you as you roll out of bed. The floor of your room isn’t a mess like your old one was (yet), so you don’t have to dodge any books or clothes or newspapers as you head for the door, opening it a crack to peer into the hall and listen before stepping outside. The light isn’t on in your mom’s room, and as you pad down the stairs, you notice none of the rest of the lights have been turned on, either. She’s not in the kitchen, and she’s not in the living room, and so you gather up your nerve, take a deep breath, and peer out the front window.

You see her.

She’s standing in the front yard in her pajamas, facing away from you. You think you can see the strap of the complimentary sleep mask CHORUS gave you both (that you, of course, don’t wear), but it’s dark and it’s lost in her brown hair so it’s hard for you to tell. 

And she just...stands there. For a really long time. You try to figure out what it is she could be staring at, but come up empty. Then, you catch sight of someone in pajamas leaving the house across the street, though they’re too far away to see clearly--your mom raises her head and starts stumbling towards them, hands out in front of her as if bracing for a fall.

You watch as the two meet up and start walking off down the street until you lose sight of them.

You continue staring out the window for several long moments, before you sit down hard on the carpet. Buster trots up to you and starts rubbing against your leg and meowing, as if he’s decided that you might as well feed him while you’re up. You reach over absently to pet him, but he practically turns himself into a boneless slinky to avoid your hand, not that you’re really paying attention.

Your mom has _never_ sleepwalked before, not even when she was getting three hours a night and sleeping all day because of work. Besides, her meeting with the neighbor seemed...orchestrated? You don’t know much about sleepwalking, but you’re not sure sleepwalkers can coordinate that well.

You stay in the living room for a while, mind going a million miles an hour, before you return to your room (and you _don’t_ feed the cat--more than a little bit, at least) and pull out your laptop. Your article is forgotten as all of your brainpower goes to researching sleepwalking as best you can without Google, and you get so focused that you barely notice when the sun starts to rise outside your window.

Eventually, you hear your mom come back in the house and go back to bed. She gets up an hour later, but it’s for real this time, as you hear her bustling around in the kitchen making breakfast.

(Sunday mornings are pancake mornings. They always have been.) 

You head downstairs and ask her about the previous night. Her brows furrow, lines creasing her forehead, and then her eyes go a bit glassy and she tells you that you were probably hearing things, that there’s nothing to worry about.

That only makes you worry more, as you grab her arm before she can blithely pour her coffee creamer into the pancake batter.

* * *

As it turns out, this isn’t an isolated incident. You’re not sure why you bothered to hope it was.

It does turn out to be a bit of an anomaly, but only in terms of schedule. Over the next several nights, you stay up late on purpose and put a pattern together; your mom always gets up about an hour after going to bed (which is always an hour after your curfew), then gets back in bed for about an hour before getting up ‘for real’.

Where she goes and what she does varies. Several nights are the same as the first, where she leaves the house through the front door and disappears until morning. Some nights, however, she stays in the house, pacing the halls for hours and hours. It’s on one of these nights that she suddenly opens your door and nearly scares the life out of you; you hide under your covers and pretend to be asleep, and she just stands there for five minutes solid before turning around and shutting the door without a word.

On two occasions, you hear her footsteps on concrete before they disappear. When you head down to check in the garage, she’s nowhere to be found, and you can’t see any way she could’ve gotten outside without opening the garage door.

(Your eyes slide right over the panel of missing drywall behind your mom’s car without seeing it. It’s like you physically can’t focus on it, and your brain fills in the gap where it should be.)

The weirdness quickly starts to bleed into the daytime, too. Your mom grows distracted, tired, confused; she forgets things, like seeing you off for school in the morning, or cleaning the cat litter on the days you two agreed she’s supposed to. She spends less time tending to her planter boxes and more time sitting on the couch, absolutely glued to the local news station.

(You feel a pang in your chest as you remember, a few years ago, your mom chastising your dad for watching the news too much, claiming it just got him overly riled up with the current state of affairs.)

In fact, that’s where you find her when you wake up Sunday morning; sitting on the couch, watching the news, the kitchen untouched.

Pancakes on Sundays have been a tradition for you ever since you were much smaller and tried to make a blueberry smiley-face pancake for your dad, only to run screaming upon seeing the messy results. Sometimes, she’s had to skip the ritual due to being tired from work, but she’s never outright _forgotten,_ and she’s always been apologetic about it.

You decide to give her the benefit of the doubt and wait a few hours. When evening comes and she starts making dinner without a word about it, you gather the nerve to speak up.

“Mom?” You sit on the arm of the couch, swinging your legs as you watch your mom at the kitchen stove. She takes a few seconds to respond with an acknowledging ‘hmm’. “Pancakes?”

Another few seconds pass, before she stops what she’s doing and turns to you with a wrinkled brow. You notice she’d been stirring the spaghetti with a spatula. “What? You want pancakes at six in the evening?”

“It’s Sunday.”

“And?”

Your heart jumps into your throat, but you swallow it down. “We always do pancakes on Sunday. I was just...wondering if you forgot.”

Your mom shakes her head with a sigh, turning back to the pot. “Right. It’s not _that_ big of a deal, is it?”

You stare at the carpet and neither of you say anything more. She’s right, of course, it isn’t a big deal--at least, it _shouldn’t_ be as big of a deal to you as it is, it shouldn’t break your heart and make your eyes sting to hear her brush it off so easily. It’s dumb. Childish. You’re too old for it. You’re being stupid. It’s just pancakes.

But it only cements the fact that the person in the kitchen who looks like your mom is very rapidly starting to act like she’s not even your mom at all, and you can’t even begin to figure out _why_.

* * *

As if the world hasn’t had enough of a laugh at your expense, someone tries to break into your house later that week.

You’re up late as usual, sitting at your desk tapping away at your laptop. You still haven’t gotten that article done, but now you’re too busy writing about your mom’s nightly wanderings, as if hoping if you use enough fancy words and varied sentence structure somebody you show might actually believe you (because you’ve had approximately less than zero luck asking teachers about weird sleepwalking habits so far and just gotten threatened with detention, which you’re absolutely _not_ going to risk having on your record). Your window’s open that night, to let some air into the stuffy room you’ve been hiding from your mom in all day, and there’s a pile of empty fun-sized bags of chips and granola bar wrappers on your desk that’s starting to leak onto the floor, along with a mug of chamomile tea that had gotten cold twenty minutes ago.

You’re wrapped up in describing the way your mom stumbles with arms outstretched, blindly feeling at the air, when a _thud_ on your roof knocks the wind out of you. Whirling around with wide, panicked eyes, hands held up as if this will somehow help you, you’re nearly blinded by a phone flashlight shined directly at you, entirely obscuring the face of its wielder. For a long moment, there’s silence as you squint at the stranger and they, presumably, stare at you.

They put their phone away, and you see equally wide, muddy-colored eyes looking back at you. Halfway inside your window is a kid your age you think you recognize from third period history, with curly dirty-blond hair in an absolute rat’s nest, a suntan like he _definitely_ used to live somewhere that wasn’t Virginia, and a long and pointy sort of face that puts him together in a way that reminds you of an alpaca. You constantly see him sleeping in class with his head on his desk, and yet whenever the teacher calls on him, he always immediately gives her the right answer before going right back to sleep.

Come to think of it...has he even been at school for the last few days? You’ve been so wrapped up in your mom’s plight that other details are hard to remember. Either way, he’s definitely got bags under his eyes.

He opens and closes his mouth like a startled fish, and your throat’s too frozen up from the shock to let any words out. After another moment, he stuffs his phone in his hoodie pocket, gives you a thin smile, waves awkwardly, and slides out of your window. Your legs finally let you move and you jump out of your chair, practically _flinging_ yourself at the window to slam it shut, heart pounding out of your chest. Outside, you see the kid jump off your roof into your backyard, before he cleanly vaults the fence and runs off down the street.

You’re frozen at that window for a while longer, until your heart stops racing and you can actually get air in your lungs. You make double, _triple_ sure the window is locked before you head back to your laptop and open a new Word document to write about the encounter.

You are _definitely_ going to ask him about this the _second_ you see him at school again.

* * *

The day after the break-in, you feel another brief spark of hope when you hear your mom calling down the stairs that she wants to show you something on her phone. 

This hope, of course, is snuffed out faster than Buster’s dignity after that one time he rolled flat off the back of the couch trying to swat at a fly.

You and your mom used to show each other random stuff you found on the internet that would make you laugh. A lot of the time, it was pictures of cats or animals, or dumb Pinterest ideas and recipes, or those stupid ‘DIY project’ videos you’re pretty sure are supposed to be ironic. She’d even gotten into sending you memes relating to writing, authors, or the books you liked (which always had that sort of awkward, uncanny quality typical of Old People Memes, but had been getting better since you’d started _educating_ your mom on the finer points of memetic humor.)

But when you get to the bottom of the stairs and your mom shows you her phone, you have absolutely no idea what it is you’re looking at--and when you figure it out, you don’t think this would even tickle the weird sense of humor of the younger middle school kids, let alone your mom.

Your mom’s shoulders are still shaking, and she’s biting her lip like she’s fighting a losing battle with the giggles. You watch the video clip once, twice, but nope, there seems to be no sudden funny part at the end. The video is just of a yak (or maybe a buffalo?) standing in a field eating grass, with a low, just-shy-of-musical drone in the background that makes your eyes cross the closer attention you pay to it.

“...I don’t get it,” you say eventually.

Your mom pulls the phone back, watching the clip again. “Really? I j--” And she dissolves into wheezing and snorting and you can almost believe it’s really your mom. “I--I can’t explain it. I really can’t.”

Briefly, you wonder if Redacre has any psychiatric services, because it seems like your mom has finally well and truly snapped. But, no, no matter how weird she’s acting, this is still your mom--your tough, go-getter mom who raised you and educated you and has never let anything stop her, and would absolutely tell you if something was wrong.

So you force yourself to smile and tell her it’s hilarious, and the beaming grin you get back from her is almost worth the lie.

* * *

To your total surprise, a few days after the yak incident...things actually start to look up. It all starts with one small thing that might be considered an abject miracle, something you never would’ve believed was possible had you not seen it with your own eyes.

Your sleep schedule fixes itself.

[Around curfew, you start to get drowsy, and you fall asleep almost instantly. Your dreams are weird, but you swear you hear music in between waking and sleeping, music that feels like home and belonging and sinking into a warm bath. Even when you pass out at your laptop, you wake up in bed. You figure your mom put you there but she never mentions it.

You do wake up with broken nails, scrapes, dirt. One morning you wake up to a line of angry pain along your side; you remember dreaming about moving strings, and you’re not lined up with their rhythm yet. A loud noise, and you fall onto your face. Briefly, you look around in a panic because you don’t know where you are, but then you hear the music again and remember you are safe.

Even with your sleep schedule fixed, you still feel really tired all the time. You can’t focus. You don’t write as much. And then one night you go to bed just like usual. But...]

* * *

_“WAKE UP.”_

The words cut through your dream like a knife, in your own voice that sounds like a stranger’s to you. You see flickers of letters etched in red behind your eyes and a feeling like an electric shock crawls up your body, vibrating inside your head with a burst of static that blocks out the music and--

Your eyes fly open, and you find yourself staring into the face of the kid who tried to break into your house, who’s grabbing your head with both hands and pressing down on your forehead with a finger like he’s trying to close an eye that isn’t there.

It takes a second for your brain to kick into gear enough to process the situation, but when it does, you jerk in surprise, realize you can’t move your legs, and sharply inhale to let out a scream. The kid quickly takes his hands off your head and uses one to cover your mouth before you can make more than a squeak; his eyes are wide, and he glances about as if he’s terrified that someone could hear.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he says, in a hushed tone that only confirms the look on his face. You’re not so sure about that, and make a noise of doubt into his hand. The smell of metal clings to it in the same way garlic does, and it makes you want to gag. “I just don’t want any lucids to hear.” 

Another noise of confusion. You can’t for the life of you figure out what he’s talking about. There’s a feminine groan from behind him. “You’re making everything worse! Is she good or not?”

“Oh--uh, yeah, thank THEE-I-DARE for me.”

With that, the kid rolls off of your chest, and you cough a couple of times to get the metal smell out of your nose. Once he’s out of the way, you can see a girl your age sprawled across your legs, who groans and gets to her feet. She’s got a round, young sort of face and her complexion’s darker than yours or the other kid’s (Indian, maybe?), and she’s got dark eyes and a dark pixie cut.

As you look up, you can see the night sky above you, filtered through tree branches. You’re lying on grass. The woods? How did you get here? A hand snakes into your vision, and you glance over to see the other kid reaching out to help you up, smiling anxiously. It takes you a few moments to get your bearings enough to sit, and you reluctantly let him help pull you to your feet--he’s surprisingly strong.

Once you’re back on your feet, the kid steps back, crossing his arms and looking you over. He then fumbles for something in his hoodie pocket and pulls out a black strip of cloth. “So! You’re awake, but that won’t last long without help. Put on this blindfold and come with us.”

You just...stare at him for several seconds, then shake your head, taking a step back. The girl groans again, elbowing the kid in the side. “Way to make us sound like criminals! I mean, _actually bad_ criminals.”

You don’t get the chance to ask if they _are_ actual criminals before the kid coughs into his free hand. “Okay, okay, fine. You.” He points directly at you. “You’re new around here, yeah?” You nod, reluctantly. ”Have your parents been acting weird?” You move as if to take _another_ step back and contemplate bolting into the woods, but the look on your face must tell him the answer. “Sleepwalking?”

Your stomach flips. “...My mom, yeah. How'd you know?”

“And has _this--"_ he gestures at the woods--”happened a lot lately? Waking up places and not knowing how you got there? Or, waking up in bed but wrong, like, with your clothes on or banged up or dirty?”

Your hand instinctively travels to your side, where the angry welts suddenly remind you of their existence as if in response. 

The kid nods, very enthusiastically. “So there you go! Weird shit happens in this place, and it’s just been getting weirder lately. We can help. There’s a ton of us, and we can explain what’s going on. But you’ve _gotta_ let us take you somewhere safer. Blindfold’s just a paranoia thing, but they’ll get pissed off if we don’t do it.”

“Your social skills are _truly_ a _shining_ beacon in this dark time we live in,” the girl says, sarcasm dripping from her words, before she looks to you. “It’s true, though. We can’t let _them_ find out where the club’s set up, and yes we’ll explain _them_ when we get there.”

“I don’t know,” you say, but it’s clear your heart’s not in it. You’re burning with curiosity, and the thought of finally getting some _answers_ about what’s happened to your mom is _tantalizing,_ but also you’re not supposed to trust strangers, especially when they want you to wear a blindfold.

The girl crosses her arms. “Well, if you need more convincing, do _you_ have any idea where in the woods you are?”

You open your mouth to respond, then close it as you look around. Despite your mom insisting otherwise, trees are trees, and they all look the same to you. 

“Exactly. So?”

...As usual, your curiosity wins out, along with a strong desire to _not_ have to wander around lost in the woods. You still pout, though, because you don’t have to be _happy_ about it. “If I die, my mom’s gonna kill you.”

“She might anyway,” the kid says with a shrug. The girl promptly stomps on his foot, _hard_ , and he lets out a high-pitched yelp before scrambling towards you with the blindfold, thankfully keeping his mouth shut.

* * *

You walk for some time with one of the kids at each side, guiding you and occasionally warning you about obstacles. During the trip, they introduce themselves; the girl is Jaya, and the other kid is Connor, whom you’re quickly informed is not a “he” like you’d assumed, but _they._ You sheepishly apologize, but they shrug it off, claiming it’s a pretty new development that no one’s really ‘caught up’ on outside of the club, not even their parents. 

“Can’t always trust your parents here, but you learn real fast you can always trust the club--or, at least, you hope so.” You can hear the shrug in their voice, but you can hear the sadness underneath it just as well. “Almost there, by the way.”

[You get to the boxcar and they explain everything to you. You see the ritual car and the board with the Voices' symbols on it, one of which is covered up by a white cloth with a black symbol painted on it. You peek under the cloth when you think no one’s looking, and Jaya tells you the symbol underneath is of someone who’s gone now. You want to ask more, but the way Connor’s shoulders hunch and they won’t look at you make you think better of it.

You go on your first mission. It’s fairly standard, you and another new guy with Connor and Jaya, one of the basic evidence gathering missions they give all the new people. But the Shape shows up anyway, and even as you’re told not to worry about it, it comes after you. Connor and Jaya frantically try to sin enough to drag it off of you, but to no avail...]

You don’t have the time to look over your shoulder to check, but you know it’s coming by the roaring and ringing in your ears and the cold feeling up your spine. The others yelling at you over the conference call goes in one ear and out the other, because you can’t focus on it, you can only focus on _running,_ but it’s faster than you, and it gains on you as your lungs burn and your legs feel like they’re about to give out.

You stumble on your feet, just a bit, and that’s enough.

The world blurs into a dizzying mess of colors as you’re abruptly spun around, and something cold and warm and electric and numb lifts you by your throat, squeezing out your already faint breath. A blast of frigid air forces your eyes shut, and you see it, looming over you, bearing down on you--you watch as its head splits open to reveal a tunnel of light that rushes towards you, and you towards it, and you feel as if you’re physically lurching forward and up into it until it fills your whole vision and…

...You are safe.

You hit the ground and kneel in the presence of the Angel, head bowed until it moves on down the street towards another lost sinner. When you open your eyes again, the colors of the world are almost too intense, everything swimming in your vision both sharp and blurry at once, bright like day. You’re not worried, though--why should you be? A pleasant numbness fills your mind, and you hear the wonderful music in your ears, feel the thoughts of all those around you trickling in and out of your head. You are all connected.

You speak as one.

You all know that there are children running about. Lost. You need to help them, because they are hiding from all of your eyes and ears. They don’t know what you know. You take out your phone and flick on the flashlight, and start patrolling down the sidewalk, aimless despite your clear goal.

Time blurs into itself, and you’re not sure how long you spend like that. It doesn’t matter, really. But you’re outside one of the houses when you hear the door open behind you, and it’s not any of you, you would feel if it was--you spin around to see one of the lost children, eyes shining with determination under your flashlight.

No. You can’t let them get you, you have to warn the others. You back up, then turn to run off, calling out for help, and you hear the others listening. They’ll come. They’ll help--

The lost child grabs you and spins you around, cupping the side of your head and pressing down on your forehead. You’re left staring into muddy brown eyes for a few seconds that stretch on and on, and…

The world snaps back into focus and your brain starts working in the way a motor hit by percussive maintenance starts working, sudden and loud. You jerk backwards with a yell and sit down hard on the sidewalk, gasping for air.

Connor sits down next to you, and grabs your shoulder. When did they get here? When did _you_ get here? “You all right?”

“I--am I all right?” You feel like steam must be coming out your ears--not the angry kind, but the ‘your brain cogs are stuck on something and you’re pretty sure they’re starting to smoke with the effort of getting unstuck’ kind. “What--”

’Angel got you.” They smile a little sheepishly at you, though you can tell it’s a bit grim. “Sorry it took so long to get you.” ‘So long’? How much time had you lost? You remember, now, the terror and then the alarming _complacency_ of it, and your eyes go wide. They reach out and grab both of your arms, squeezing. “It’s rough the first time.”

“I was…” You can’t force words out, more than a little dumbfounded, and you just squeeze back.

They let go of one of your arms and pull out their phone, and they unmute the conference call. “You guys all right?”

Jaya’s voice crackles over the line, muffled by rushing air. “Shape’s off the other newbie but now it’s after _me._ How’s Paper?”

“Got her. Can you kite it for a bit?”

“I guess? Why?”

“You’ve gotta remember the first time you got Shaped, right? It’s bad. We’re just gonna stay a couple minutes, then head for the exit.”

A brief pause. Then, “If I get grabbed, it’s on _your_ ass. Tell her I’m sorry.”

“You put _everything_ on my ass,” they respond with a snort. “Stay safe.”

Connor mutes the call and slips their phone back into their pocket. By now, at least you’ve got some of your brain cells back and the world feels like it mostly exists again, but you must still look rough, because when they look at you, they open their arms, and you’re scrambled enough to just hug them without questioning it. You feel kind of dumb doing it, but it’s still a comfort.

“Not gonna lie, happens a lot,” they tell you, “but you get...I don’t wanna say ‘used to it’, but it’s not _as_ awful. Club’s got your back.”

You’re starting to get the sense that the sentiment means a lot to them, and you want to believe in it, too. But you don’t say anything right then. You just hug them back until the two of you are ready to head for the sewers.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't remember at this point how it was going to end, but I think I was going to write the whole process of her sending her first Light of Rebellion casting her lot in with THE-MEASURE-CUTS. Also yes, Paper is her callsign because it's my ign, shut up.


End file.
